Collapsing Moritz's objective internal purposiveness with Kant's subjective reflective judgment conflates an ontological claim about artworks with an epistemological claim about aesthetic experience.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Moritz claims artworks possess intrinsic purposiveness independent of observer; Kant's reflective judgment is about how subjects experience purposiveness.
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2.Conflating these categories commits a category error: confusing what artworks ARE (ontology) with how we know about them (epistemology).
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3.Kant explicitly grounds aesthetic judgment in subjective feeling, not in objective artwork properties, marking a fundamental theoretical divide.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.Both Moritz and Kant address how purposiveness appears to consciousness; the distinction between ontological and epistemological may be artificial here.
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2.Moritz's 'objective internal purposiveness' is itself accessed only through aesthetic experience, making the ontology-epistemology split problematic.
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3.The charge of conflation requires showing these thinkers actually made this mistake; interpretive disagreement alone doesn't prove a logical category error.
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Key Terms

Conflates(in argumentation and logic): Treats two different things as if they're the same thing, or mixes them up in a way that causes confusion.
Epistemological(Describing what type of criterion Descartes's test is): Having to do with how we know things and what counts as real knowledge, rather than questions about what actually exists.
Internal purposiveness(Aristotelian; EL Remark to §204): The teleological view according to which things in the world have essences and aim to achieve (or have the purpose of living up to) their essences
Kant(as used in epistemology and metaphysics): Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was an influential German philosopher who argued that our minds shape how we experience reality, and that we can only truly know things as they appear to us, not as they are in themselves.
Moritz(as a philosopher being compared to Kant in the statement): Karl Philipp Moritz (1756–1793) was a German writer and philosopher who developed ideas about beauty and art around the same time as Kant, sometimes interpreted as disagreeing with Kant about whether beauty reveals truth.
Ontological: "Ontological" refers to questions about what actually exists or is real. It's concerned with the fundamental nature of being—asking "What kinds of things are there?" rather than "How do we know about them?" For example, an ontological question might be whether numbers, ideas, or God actually exist as real things, or if they're just human inventions.
Subjective(as used in epistemology and philosophy of mind): Relating to personal experience, feelings, or perspective—how things seem or feel to an individual person, which can differ from person to person.
aesthetic experience(Sulzer's aesthetics): A variety of free and unhindered activity of the representational capacity that produces pleasurable sentiments.
objective(1910, §10): An ideal object, something like a state of affairs or proposition, which can be expressed by an independent sentence (e.g., 'Red is a color') when judged or assumed, or by a 'that'-clause or nominal phrase when judged about.
reflective judgment(Kantian theory of aesthetic judgment): A form of judgment in which the universal is not antecedently given but must be searched out from the particular case.

Connections

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Truth & Knowledge1 linked Aesthetics1 linked

Both Moritz and Kant address how purposiveness appears to consciousness; the dis...Conflating these categories commits a category error: confusing what artworks AR...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit